By ROSS McCULLOUGH [First Things] – What I am trying to indicate, in brief, is an ethics incumbent on us not as consumers but as neighbors. For what goes with that is a sense of the beauty of the ethical, a sense that acting rightly and well can be attractive and even in a way—here a pregnant ambiguity—graceful. It is when one conceives it as an everyday affair that one begins to see the difficulty and fragility but also the supreme draw of the well-lived life. Here is something worth doing. John Duns Scotus remarks that “the moral goodness of an act is a kind of décor it has, including a due proportion to all to which it should be proportioned.” It has what the Greeks called kairos, the right moment, the perfect time—and not just the when, but what is done, and why, and where and how it is performed. It is just right.

In that sense moral behavior is a graceful thing, and the saint behaves in something like the way that Astaire danced or Sugar Ray boxed or (to sample the life of the mind) Capablanca played chess. The examples can be multiplied indefinitely, but the point is this: There is a beauty to the moral gesture, the moral life, the moral soul; there is a quiet harmony to the parts of the act and to the priorities of the life and to the passions of the mind; and there is from all this a beauty that spreads slowly and subtly but unstoppably out across this sleeping world, like the first signs of the sun.

For there is no doubt that here the world is asleep. Whatever we think of the politics and prohibitions of modern morality, there is little draw to them. We lie dumb and desensitized in a picturesque moral landscape and dream in browns and grays.

Continued at First Things |

…and as for Jesus…

By MARK LEWIS TAYLOR [Tikkun] – Beyond sanguine trust to compassionate hearts, some Christians are reframing what it means to be Christian, so that rejecting U.S. global designs — and even resisting its support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine (see the Palestinian Christian Kairos document) — become intrinsic to Christian faith and practice.

Consider Jesus. We are a few weeks from the high point of the Christian year, “Passion Week,” the time of Jesus’s entry into turbulent Jerusalem at Passover, commemorating the Hebrew people’s deliverance from Egypt’s pharaoh. It was amid this remembrance of liberation that Jesus met his crucifixion, the torturous death reserved to those who challenged imperial order in Rome-dominated Judea/Palestine.

The Christians’ holiest week, then, is a time for Christians to risk a faith that remembers and seeks liberation. As Michael Lerner wrote during Egypt’s protests, the Passover story of liberation predisposes many Jews to “side with those struggling for freedom around the world.” This Jewish Jesus should also orient Christians to yearn for all peoples’ freedom from domination.

But will U.S. Christians yearn and work for the liberation of Arabs and Muslims?

Continued at Tikkun | More Chronicle & Notices.